👋 Hello

I am a lead data scientist at the FD Mediagroep, where I lead a team of four data scientists on the award winning BNR SMART Radio, and FD’s SMART Journalism projects. I obtained my PhD in Information Retrieval at ILPS (at the University of Amsterdam) in 2017 under supervision of prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke.

This category can soon be archived ;)! Earlier this week I handed in my final paper, and yesterday was the day of my final presentation. It was a great day and I’m really excited about embarking on my next adventure. I will soon start as a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, on a very exciting project in ‘Semantic Search in e-Discovery’ at the Information and Language Processing Systems group. Naturally, this blog will keep the world informed of my work and projects ;). Exciting times!

As I blogged previously, I am working on measuring the performance of my keyword extraction algorithms. The confusion matrix approach I have implemented is quite ‘harsh’. It ignores any semantic information and simply treats the concepts as words, and counts hits and misses between two sets of concepts.

To benefit from the semantic information described in the NCI Thesaurus, and thus produce more detailed results, I will measure the algorithm’s performance by measuring the semantic similarity between the lists of concepts. The two lists (expert data & algorithm) are treated as subgraphs within the main graph: the NCI Thesaurus. Their similarity is measured with a path-based semantic similarity metric, of which there are several. I have implemented Leacock & Chodorow’s measure, as in the literature I found it consistently outperforms similar path-based metrics in the Biomedical domain. Speaking of domain; this measure has originally been designed for WordNet (as many of the other metrics), but has also been used and validated in the Biomedical domain. Hooray for domain-independent, unsupervised and corpus-free approaches to similarity measurement ;-). (more…)

Below the first draft of the abstract of my paper. It doesn’t yet include the results/conclusion. Word count: 127

Semantic annotation uses human knowledge formalized in ontologies to enrich texts, by providing structured and machine-understandable information of its content. This paper proposes an approach for automatically annotating texts of the Cyttron Scientific Image Database, using the NCI Thesaurus ontology. Several frequency-based keyword extraction algorithms, aiming to extract core concepts and exclude less relevant concepts, were implemented and evaluated. Furthermore, text classification algorithms were applied to identify important concepts which do not occur in the text. The algorithms were evaluated by comparing them to annotations provided by experts. Semantic networks were generated from these annotations and an ontology-based similarity metric was used to cross-compare them. Finally the networks were visualized to provide further insights into the differences of the semantic structure generated by humans, and the algorithms.

As I am starting to gather testing data, I figured it’d be a good time to determine how to measure the performance of the different results of my 24 text representation algorithms. What I want to measure per algorithm: how many keywords are predicted the same as the experts, and how many aren’t. After some research and valuable advice, I came across confusion matrices, which seemed appropriate. For each algorithm I measure the amount of:

The only thing with the rates are that proportions are heavily skewed because of the size of the ontology (90.000 URIs), which means the negative cases will always be much more frequent than the positives. This means that accuracy is always around 99.9%, and so is the TN. I still have to figure out exactly what information I want to use and how (visualize?).

I recently replaced python-graph in my code with NetworkX, a slightly more sophisticated graph library for Python. Besides some more advanced algorithms for graph analysis (comparison, unison etc.) which can prove useful when analyzing data (comparing human data with mine, for example), I can also easily export my graphs to all kinds of formats. For example, to JSON. As I was getting a bit tired of GraphViz’ stubborn methods, and it’s far from dynamic approach, I decided to start playing around with the excellent Data Driven Documents JavaScript library, better known as D3.js, the successor to Protovis. Actually I had planned this quite a while ago, simply because I was impressed with the Force-directed Graph example on their website. I figured for coolness sake, I should implement them, instead of using the crummy GraphViz graphs.

So after a night and day of tinkering with the D3 code (starting from the Graph example included in the release, modifying stuff as I went) I came to this:

The red nodes are the concepts taken from the texts (either literal: filled red circles, or resulting from text classification: red donuts). The orange nodes are LCS-nodes (Lowest Common Subsumers), aka ‘parent’ nodes, and all the grey ones are simply in-between nodes (either for shortest paths between nodes, or parent nodes).

I added the labels, and also implemented zoom and panning functionality (mousewheel to zoom, click and drag to pan), included some metadata (hover with mouse over nodes to see their URI, over edges to see the relation). I am really impressed with the flexibility of D3, it’s amazing that I can now load up any random graph produced from my script, and instantly see results.

The bigger plan is to make a fully interactive Graph, by starting with the ‘semantic similarity’ graph (where only the red nodes are displayed), and where clicking on edges expands the graph, by showing the relationship between two connected nodes. Semantic expansion at the click of a mouse ;)!

In other news

I’ve got a date for my graduation! If everything goes right, March 23rd is the day I’ll present my finished project. I’ll let you know once it’s final.

While I haven’t been as active and hard working on my graduation project as I would have liked to be, I am not dead (nor the project). Earlier this week I presented my project to the Bio-imaging group of Leiden University, which helped me a lot. I was able to present my project pretty much as-is, since I’m mostly done with the technical parts. I received valuable feedback and got good insights into what I should explain more thoroughly in the presentation. (more…)

First results are in! My computer spent about 20 hours to retrieve and store neighboring concepts of over 10.000 concepts which my Breadth-First-Search algorithm passed through to find the shortest paths between 6 nodes. But here is the result, first the ‘before’ graph, which I showed earlier: all retrieved concepts with their parent relations. Below that is the new graph, which relates all concepts by finding their shortest paths (so far only the orange concepts – from the Gene Ontology).

Before

After

So?

What were two separate clusters in the first to the left is now one big fat cluster… Which is cool!

Less cool is the time it took… But oh well, looks like I’m going to have to prepare some examples as proof of concepts. Nowhere near realistic realtime performance so far… (however I got a big speed increase by moving my Sesame triple store from my ancient EeePC900 to my desktop computer… Goodbye supercomputer). The good news is that all neighboring nodes I processed so far are cached in a local SQLite database, so those 20 hours were not a waste! (considering my total ontology database consists out of over 800.000 concepts, and 10.000 concepts took 20 hours, is something I choose not to take into consideration however :p).

It is important to note that the meaning or interpretation of the resulting graph (and particularly the relations between concepts) is not the primary concern here: the paths (their lengths, the directions of the edges and the node’s ‘depths’) will be primarily used for the ontology-based semantic similarity measure I wrote about in this post.

The first steps towards creating graph-based text visualizations is thinking about how I would like to visually represent the structure of the information I extract from texts. I have included a preliminary example of the output at the bottom of this page. I use three different methods of extracting concepts from a piece of text:

Counting literal occurrences of concepts (from ontologies)

Finding related concepts by textual comparison of the text to the concepts’ descriptions

Finding related concepts by exploring the ontological structure (aka relating concepts within one ontology by finding paths and parents, and possibly relevant neighbours)

The primary distinction I want to make is that of relevance (aka ‘likeliness of topic’). In the case of 1 this would be the frequency of the word (more occurrences = more relevant concept), in the case of 2 this is the calculated similarity of the source text to the concepts’ descriptions (which is a number between 0 and 1). In the case of 3, this would be by ‘connections’: the more concepts the concepts I find by exploring an ontologies’ structure would link, the more relevant this found concept would be. I want to model this distinction by node’s size: the more relevant a concept is, the bigger I want to draw the concept in the graph.

The second distinction is that of literal to non-literal (1 being literal, 2 and 3 being non-literal). I want to model this distinction by style: literal concepts will be drawn as a filled circle, non-literal concepts as outlined circles.

The third distinction is that of the concepts’ source: from which ontology does a concept originate? This distinction will be modeled by color: each ontology (of the six I use) will have its distinct color. Explored concepts (from step 3) such as parents and shared parents will be colored in distinct colours as well, since they are connected in the graph to the coloured nodes, their source will implicitly be clear.

Since Gephi doesn’t fully support Graphviz’ DOT-language, and the graph library I use in Python conveniently parses graphs in DOT, I use Graphviz to directly render the results.

An issue I came across with the scaling (to represent relevance), is that I’m working with multiple measures: frequency of literal words (1), percentage of text-similarity (2), and degree-count. In an effort to roughly equalize the scaling factor, I decided to use static counters. Each node gets an initial size of 0.5 (0.4 for shared parents, and 0.3 for parents). For each occurrence of a literal word, I add 0.05. For the text-similarity, I add the percentage of 0.5 (26% similarity = 0.5 + (0.5*0.26)). For the degree, I add 0.1 for each in-link the node receives. This is an initial attempt at unifying the results. Anyway, these are just settings I’m playing around with.

Examples

These are very rough examples, because:

I use the literal representation of the input text (as I have not yet determined the most suitable keyword extraction method)

I haven’t determined a proper ‘cut-off’ for the text similarity measure; currently it includes every concept it finds with similarity ≥ 25%.

It doesn’t yet fully incorporate step 3 (it includes parents, but not yet paths between nodes)

It doesn’t scale nodes according to in-links

There is no filtering applied yet (removing obsolete classes, for example).

All this time I have been working on my ontology-powered topic identification system: combining semantic web technologies with natural language processing and text-mining techniques to extract (a) topic(s) from a text. But I never really decided what my program should output: a topic? A list of potential topics with their ‘likeliness’? That would mean the relationships between topics my SPARQL-powered ‘pathfinder’ finds would disappear in an algorithm that used those paths to calculate semantic similarity, which would be a pitty. This weekend it finally all came together:

Visualize!

I already played around with drawing graphs with Gephi, as a method to check the results in a way other than processing huge lists in my python interpreter. But now I realize it could be the perfect ‘final product’. What I want to create is a ‘semantically-augmented tag-cloud-graph‘. As opposed to a standard tagcloud, my augmented tag graph will be a visualization of the text, composed of both interlinked concepts and solitary concepts, concepts that can be found literally in the text and concepts that aren’t mentioned anywhere in the text. The tag graph will benefit from the linked data nature of ontologies to:

1. Show relationships between concepts
2. Show extra concepts which do not occur literally in the text: nodes that occur in a path between two nodes, and maybe ‘superClass’ and ‘subClass’ nodes.

In this way, it will be similar to a tag cloud as it conveys the content of a text, but augmented as it could convey the meaning of a text and relationships between tags. It will also be similar to the DBPedia RelFinder, but augmented as it will show links but also contain a hierarchy of more to less important concepts. I hope that in the end it could be a viable alternative of graphic text-representation.

Visualize what?

As I see it, my semantic graph-cloud should communicate at least these three things:
1. The most likely topic of the text
2. The concepts which occur literally in the text versus concepts that do not occur in the text
3. Clusters of similar concepts

My first idea is to model these three properties by size, alpha-channel and colour respectively, the bigger node, the more likely the topic, transparant nodes are the ones that do not occur in the text, and coloured nodes to group semantically similar nodes. But that’s just my initial plan, I might have to give it some more thoughts and experiment with it.

Next, I should think about a method to ‘measure’ whether my semantic tagcloud conveys more information, or has ajy added value. In the end, I am totally unsure whether the resulting tag graphs will make sense as it depends on multiple factors such as the efficiency of my keyword extraction, the efficiency of the vector-space based string comparison, the quality of the ontologies, etc.

The good news is, most of the technical work is in a close-to-finished state. I have various methods of extracting keywords from large texts (which I will be validating soon), I have a functional method to find ‘new’ concepts by comparing a text to all the descriptions of ontology concepts, I have a functional shortest-path finder to explore how two concepts are related (and produce a graph of it). It’s just a matter of putting it all together and selecting a suitable tool to draw the graphs. I don’t think I’ll use Gephi, as I want to fully integrate the graph drawing in my script, so who knows, maybe it’s back to NetworkX, igraph, or maybe Protovis?

In the mean time I’m looking at validating the data I generated with the various keyword extraction algorithms. By using human experts and cross-validating with existing keywords from certain entries, I’ll be able to evaluate which method of keyword extraction is the most efficient for my purposes. Once that’s done, and I’ve picked my graph-drawing method, I can start showing some preliminary results!